More than 18 months since the scandal first hit the headlines, women are still not being offered pain relief in coil fittings as standard procedure
It was with stubborn determination that Sophia Stewart walked into her office one autumnal morning. Doggedly ambitious and intent on making a good impression in her new job, she sat down at her desk, doing her best to ignore her shaking body as the deepset cramps emanating from her abdomen grew increasingly painful until: ‘I couldn’t stand the pain any longer,’ the 31-yearold PR director from north Wales recalls. ‘ Within an hour of being back at my desk I was standing in front of my new boss, tearfully asking to go home.’ It wasn’t until she was curled up with a hot water bottle in bed that she felt the first embers of a rage that would become a roar. ‘As I lay there, I began to feel horrified that a coil fitting – in which no one had even mentioned pain – had left me screaming in agony. I honestly felt violated.’
If you’ve ever had the tiny T-shaped device inserted into your uterus, you’ll either be horrified by Sophia’s story, having barely felt a thing, or empathetic after your own painful experience. The split has positioned the topic as the current focus of the women’s contraceptive crisis that has gone from WhatsApp fodder to headline news. In June 2021, the writer and mother of two Caitlin Moran, 47, detailed her 20-minute ordeal in The Times, asking how it came to be that women were being subjected to ‘a wire coat hanger from a doll’s house’. Soon after, BBC broadcaster Naga Munchetty, also 47, described on Radio 5 Live how she fainted twice during her own ‘traumatic’ procedure. Then, a viral TikTok posted by @midwifemama demonstrated the painful reality of IUD insertion.
The match that ignited this fire of discontent? A petition, calling for better pain relief at fittings, created by Welsh businesswoman Lucy Cohen, 38, after her excruciating insertion, and promptly endorsed by author Caroline Criado Perez. It has gained 35,000 signatures – one of which is mine. I was 24 when a procedure to fit a coil left me in such tearful, nauseous pain that I spent an hour being monitored. And all these years on (I’m now 30), women still aren’t being offered pain relief as standard; 32% of women were offered none, found a survey by contraceptive platform The Lowdown, published in conjunction with The Daily Mail. It begs a question: how female-friendly is this form of contraception?
Fitting in
The first ‘modern’ coil was created in the 1920s by a German doctor called Ernst Gräfenberg (he of G-spot fame). But – thanks to the pill – it took until the 2000s for the device to hit the contraceptive big-time. ‘There’s been a large drive in the past 15 years towards
